‘I would say tackle the world and do so with joy’
Exclusive: President Michael D Higgins speaks to Joyce Fegan during his triumphant tour of Latin America
PRESIDENT Michael D Higgins has spoken about breaking down and weeping on the train between Dublin and Galway as he finished a searing poem of self-indictment that recounted his greatest guilt — putting his aged father into the poor house.
In a reflective and candid interview conducted in Latin America, President Higgins told the Sunday Independent how he first tried writing the poem The Betrayal but had to set it aside.
“The truth about that poem is that I began writing that and then abandoned it for a long while,” admitted Higgins.
He returned to it eventually, finishing it on the train from Galway to Dublin, where he remembers “weeping when I was reconstructing the circumstances of it”.
“And I can never hope to forget what was, after all, a betrayal,” he wrote in the poem.
There are parts of the poem he would repair were he re-visiting the work, but having said that, he “wouldn't hide anything”.
Asked if he feels he was too hard on himself about his father's final days, he answered by saying, “I think that's part of my inheritance psychologically”.
He then quoted Sean O’Casey, who said his experience of poverty was like a ”disease of the bones”.
Higgins told the Sunday Independent that his father and his uncles had both fought in the War of Independence, but during the Civil War his father was on the republican side and his uncles were with the Free State. “(It is) the great tragedy in the Civil War,” he said.
The President’s hugely successful return to Latin America also gave him time to reflect on his earlier involvement in the region as a human rights activist.
In the last week he has visited Mexico, signing seven bilateral agreements, and El Salvador, where he returned to receive state honours almost exactly 30 years after he was deported from that country.
This week, Higgins is in Costa Rica, where he'll address the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
A bitter and bloody civil war raged in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992 — a conflict which became a leitmotif of Higgins’s passionate advocacy of human rights and social justice.
The Salvadoran state was armed by the US and tens of thousands of people were massacred.
Higgins was a leading critic, making international headlines when he was deported from the war-torn region in 1982.
Last week, he returned, to the strains of Amhran na bhFiann being played as his plane touched down; a Tricolour was raised and full military honours conferred.
“There's a big difference between arriving and being asked to leave and arriving and being given the keys to the city,” said Higgins about his return last Wednesday night.
During the Eighties he did a 48-hour fast outside the US embassy in Dublin because of their armament of the Salvadoran military government, but now he reflects on the pressure of that time.
Mr Higgins noted that Ireland had benefited from foreign investment, with a lot of money coming from America. He said that there was a choice to be made. You could say nothing at all, ensuring that there would be “no aspect of United States opinion that would be upset”.
‘Let nothing damage your self-esteem. Protect your dignity and respect it in others’
In 1982, after torturous efforts to gain access to El Salvador, Higgins visited rubbish dumps on the outskirts of San Salvador, where decapitated bodies were routinely left so relatives could recover them.
“It was a life-changing experience,” he admitted last week.
Now with the role of the Presidency comes circumspection. He has had to “move into a new space” — one in which he must operate with “prudence and discretion”.
Higgins has recently come under pressure from the media for what was interpreted as commenting on government policy in national and international speeches he delivered.
He told the Sunday Independent that he respects both the Constitution and its limits. While he cannot comment on legislation before the houses of the Oireachtas, this doesn't stop him from speaking on the major issues of the day like “the ravages of unemployment, emigration and the need for new thinking on economics”.
This is him, he says, finding a new way to “bring the debate on”.
Higgins has referred to Bishop Eamon Casey's involvement in El Salvador on numerous occasions in his speeches in Latin America and has also given lectures on the ethics of memory.
The Sunday Independent asked Higgins if he thinks the bishop's role in the region at the time has been given due recognition.
“Oh, I do, I think it had a great effect, there is no doubt whatsoever that the work of Trocaire in those years was very significant,” he said.
Asked what advice he'd give his 20-year-old self, he said: “Let nothing damage your self-esteem, protect your dignity and respect it in others.”
On his regular trips to schools in Ireland, he instructs children to “act immediately” if they see the first signs of “bullying or homophobic bullying”.
Higgins is anguished about the rising levels of suicide in Ireland. He said he was “concerned desperately that we would have some young people that would be driven to the point where they thought their life couldn't be turned around or that they thought they were worthless”.
This, he believes, would be a “dreadful indictment of our contemporary world”.
Higgins would also “love to see” alternatives being developed so that some young people did not feel alcohol was necessary in order to enjoy life.
People shouldn't “throw their lives away within their lifetime”, because everything is going to be different, including the world of work and how it's defined — “I would say tackle the world and do so with joy”.
Higgins is today in Costa Rica and on Tuesday addresses the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The speech will be delivered on the second anniversary of his Presidency.